From The New York Times:
Ludwig Bemelmans grew up hearing stories about a young girl who attended a boarding school where the students “slept in little beds that stood in two rows” and “went walking in two straight lines.”
That young girl was his mother, Franciska. Today we might recognize her in Madeline, the smallest of the French schoolgirls in colorful little dresses and bows.
Since the publication of Mr. Bemelmans’s first book, in 1939, the Madeline series has become a cosmopolitan cultural touchstone, the first step on the path to bona fide Francophilia for those who have never visited France. The series resonated with decades of American families, including the Kennedys: Jacqueline and Mr. Bemelmans were discussing the possibility of collaborating on a book shortly before he died in 1962.
. . . .
Mr. Bemelmans arrived in America on Christmas Eve 1914 expecting to be reunited with his father, according to “Bemelmans: The Life and Art of Madeline’s Creator,” a book by his grandson John Bemelmans Marciano.
But Lampert “forgot to pick him up,” Mr. Marciano wrote, “and he was forced to spend his first Christmas in America on Ellis Island.”
. . . .
He found his way into the hotel industry and, while working at the Ritz-Carlton, began to write and draw extensively. By the early 1930s, he had begun to place illustrations in the Saturday Evening Post. And in 1934, newly married to his wife Freund, known as Mimi, he published his first children’s book, “Hansi” (with the help of May Massee, a children’s book editor at the Viking Press.) Several more children’s books followed, along with stories published in The New Yorker and Vogue.
Mr. Bemelmans wrote many books, for children and for adults, that did not feature his famous heroine. They include “The Golden Basket,” “Quito Express,” “Fifi,” “Welcome Home,” “Small Beer,” “The Blue Danube,” “The Woman of My Life” and dozens of others.
“He was so prolific,” said Regina Hayes, editor-at-large at Viking, which publishes Mr. Bemelmans’s books. “He was an essayist, a novelist, wrote books about food, wrote and illustrated for The New Yorker and Holiday Magazine,” a travel journal.
It took the birth of his first and only child, Barbara, and a fortuitous trip to France, for the book that made him famous to materialize. In 1938, the young family traveled to the southern part of the country. In the midst of the trip, Mr. Bemelmans was sent to the hospital because of a bike crash, where in an adjoining room was a girl who was recovering from an appendectomy.
. . . .
Madeline, who has a bout of appendicitis in the first book, came together soon after. “He would later say that his creation was a combination of his mother, wife and daughter,” Mr. Marciano writes. “But certainly it was also part Bemelmans himself — the smallest in class, the one always in trouble.”
Link to the rest at The New York Times where you’ll also find some of Bemelmans’ Madeline drawings.